the plan, stan.

In three months, we will have just wrapped up three weeks of packing and family visits and will be en route from Baltimore to Auckland, via Los Angeles. If all goes according to plan, we will arrive in New Zealand before 8 am on August 20th and be welcomed by a warm (unlikely), sunny (unlikely), beautiful (very likely) landscape. Depending on the extent of our jetlag, this first day could be spent energetically exploring the city or listlessly waiting on an amenable park bench for a reasonable hour to check into a hostel.

If all goes better than the plan, we will have met a nice couple on the plane who took a liking to us (as we reminded them of their early, world-traveling years together) and invited us to stay for a week or two in their sprawling beachhouse, from which point they will gladly shuttle us to the trailhead at Cape Reinga as soon as we have eaten our fill of their gourmet cooking. If I had the conversational abilities of my mother, this would be a likely scenario. (Un)fortunately, I inherited my father's genes on this one.

While originally I had planned only to blog while actually in New Zealand, as I am concerned enough about holding your attention as it is, the 90-day mark is revealing itself to be more meaningful to me than I had originally anticipated and I would like to share with you the final stages of our preparation process, should you have any interest.

If not, no harm done - simply check back in a few months and enjoy my posts from the much more enthralling southern hemisphere. You can expect to find detailed accounts from me on a number of exotic topics, including (but not limited to) sandflies, blisters, cutesy things said by my husband that will make you gag, and place names that will usually start with a w and end in an unpronouncable jumble of vowels.